Overcoming the Weakest-Link Effect in LLM-Driven Program Optimization via Heterogeneous Edit Recombination

arXiv:2607.28947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to solve complex problems by searching over program space, offering a general paradigm for scientific problems that can be naturally represented and solved as programs. Despite recent progress, identifying effective optimization directions for a candidate program remains challenging. By analogy with automatic differentiation, existing methods typically guide the search using a textual ``gradient'':...